How to Live in America and Stay Sane

A pastime little referred to in the daily chat on television and in the waning newsprint is the shocked reaction of “oldsters” to the changes in attitudes, education, sex habits, living systems, cars, boats, animals, and everything else in the last seventy-five years.

In the first place, at my birthtime, 1925, babies were 99% born at home and in the ordinary bed of the mother. In my case, my Father was a country doctor, and his medical friend took over my birth as it was frowned upon for a doctor to deliver his own offspring.

To pursue further the doctor difference, my Dad charged $1 for office visits and $2 for house visits and that included most ordinary medicines. He charged $25 for a baby delivery but THAT included prenatal and postnatal care. I leave it to you to do the comparisons!

HOSPITALS were rarely entered, and then only when there was a situation non-handleable by the local M.D.

PHARMACIES were called DRUGSTORES and yep, you could buy a six ounce bottle of paregoric(tincture of opium) for eighty-five cents. It did not seem to cause great drug use as most people used paregoric to swab teething babies gums when they were fretful.

EDUCATION was a luxury but with the 1879 laws making public education mandatory, people gruffly and unwillingly attended at least to the third grade. Each county had a special “cop” who patrolled the county(at peril of his life) and forced the kids to come to school.

Once in the school, the kid had by the end of the THIRD grade learned how to read, how to write, and the rudiments of arithmetic. He had also learned state, national, and local history. If he lived on a dirt farm in a poverty stricken family, he was content with three grades, and went back to the plough, and to hell wih the truant officer.

The level of education taught in that THIRD grade about equalled th level now taught in the final grades of high school. It escapes this writer how the schools have been watered down to that extent in 75 years.

COLLEGE was reserved for the children of doctors, lawyers, and clergymen. Anyone else would have to be a bootlegger, a successful business man, or the like to be able to send the kid to college.

And that kid was MALE. WOMEN , females, were sent to college ONLY if they planned to remain celibate and TEACH. TEACHERS were nearly all female, and they were NOT allowed to marry.